everyday people (1968)
Sly & the Family Stone. Rock/Soul/R&B, California USA.
key: G blues
mode: G A Bb C C# D F; alternately, G pentatonic: G A B D E
melody: d r m f s l d’ r’ m’
form: verse-chorus
meter: duple
English function names: tonic subdominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T S
Scale degrees: I IV
Chords: G C G C G
|:/-/-/-/-|/-/-/-/-:| loopThe original recording is actually microtonally somewhere in between G and Ab, which makes it a tad frustrating to play along with. You may want to play along with one of the other recordings listed at the end, but you certainly should have several good listens to the original. How do I decide on one key over the other? Obviously, if I'm working with beginning ukuleleists or guitarists, G is the much more friendly key — as evidenced in the recordings below. However, I have arranged this for beginning wind players, and in that situation, Ab is the more friendly key.1
What key does Sly play it in? Live videos help because sometimes you get a nice glimpse of what people are actually doing with the instruments. I'm not going to link more videos in the name of reducing visual clutter, but there's an Ed Sullivan performance that is definitely in G (even though you can't see the hands on the instruments). Sometimes this method backfires, because people will change things up for live performances. Electric Avenue is another recording that is not always quite A and I've seen live recordings where one is in A and another is in Ab.2 Bob Dylan has performed and recorded versions of Blowin' in the Wind in D and G (and probably other keys). People's voices change over their lives. People's opinions change over their lives. Sometimes, you just want to mix it up.
This is another song which, makes me want to improvise with a blues scale, despite the lack of blue notes in the melody and harmony. The sung melody is mostly pentatonic, a common melodic pitch set for American folk musics from both white and black peoples (also common in other cultures around the world). Scholars have also proposed that the blues scale is simply an extension of the pentatonic set. Sometimes the blues scale is presented without the second scale degree I have above, making it G Bb C (C#) D F. Remove the blue note and you have G Bb C D F, the la-based pentatonic minor related to the do-based pentatonic major Bb C D F G. This article has a good history and overview of the different theories about where the African elements of the blues come from, and also discusses a different pentatonic set than the one usually cited by Western scholars (in our case it would be G A B D F).
The loop is a counterpoise sandwich, but with the counterpoise coming on the “& of four” or the second half of the fourth beat, and returning to the tonic on the “& of one” (symbolized by dashes up there). A very thin slice of counterpoise with thickly cut tonic. Despite its brief duration in the loop, the counterpoise’s syncopated position gives it a nice kick — a very groovy beat, in every sense of groovy.
If you'd like to read more about Sly himself, here are two recent (as of the writing of this entry), contrasting takes:
other recordings:
Joan Jett, Album, Legacy Recordings. G blues.
The Staples Singers, We'll Get Over, Stax. G blues.
Jeff Buckley, You & I, Columbia/Legacy. G blues.
Medeski Martin & Wood, Combustication, Blue Note Records. Ab blues.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and posit that the reason MMW play it in Ab even though they are an organ trio is because they are jazzers and jazzers work mainly with saxes, trumpets, and trombones, which are all instruments that favor flat keys.
I'm finding that the versions of the studio recordings online are now clearly in A, but when I first looked at this song several years back, it was not so clear!